Site Tracker

Thursday, April 19, 2007

House maids

The parliament was informed that we Malaysians have 310661 foreign house maids and 94.8% are from Indonesia.The deputy minister expressed his concernS on our dependency of others looking after our households;not to mention our children and our older citizens.

Personally,I did employ one house maid from Thailand when my kids were young some 20 years ago.There are pros and cons to this issue and many of us have good and bad experience. Taking care of the house and the kids are endless tiring work.The question is what are the alternatives?

Now, all my kids are young adults, and yet my wife still needs a helper once a week to clean our house as we are getting older.(our neighbour's maid works part time for us).Not only for us and our kids, but when we are all working,who takes care of our aging parents? My cousin employed an Indonesian maid to look after her mother.

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Yes Adib, why cant we have local maids? Why are we paying pittance to the person who is charged with looking after our most valuable possessions, our kids, our homes, our aged parents? And in some isolated cases threat them like sub-humans too. We should accord them with the same value and respect that we give to other jobs holders.

As a working mom of seven, I have loads of experience on maids both local and foreign. Let me share my experience with my local maids. They were the earlier ones which I hired when my kids are mere toddlers. Two were school leavers whom I thought would be good companion for the kids. They only took care of the kids whereas I (with the help of my husband) did all other housechores including cooking for the helpers. The problems cropped up when they became interested in the local social scene (and TV and telephones), being teenagers. I got hints from my well-meaning neighbours that these helpers were seen in public without my kids while we were at work! When they were confronted, both denied. On one maid, we had to hurry to her parent's home saying their daughter had ran away and we would not be responsible if anything happened to her. The other one we simply left at her parent's door step. Next maid was a temp. She worked to clean the house while the kids were all sent to nurseries. My stature in the community grew because this helper has been spreading news about us being very good and generous employer thru the neighborhood. We terminated her when we finally figured out that what she meant was while she was in our employ, she never need to do her groceries anymore! She fleeced everything she needed for the day from our stock. We didn't realised it coz it was just a piece or two of chicken, fish, some sugar, rice, fruits, etc.

Well, that's all about my local maids. To tell about my foregn maids, I will have to build my own blog...

Hi Sally, I had a good laugh with your experience with local maids. I, on the other hand enjoyed my first of two local maids I had employed in my entire life todate. My first maid was Timah short of Fatimah, but we nick named her 'Abang' cos of her 'melatah'(?) She started working for me in the month of Ramadan one year many eons ago when I lived a different life. Every day when I arrived home, my two gurls would have been bathed, and contentedly resting; my bed would be crisply made, dinner on the table with the best local food, all of us would sit down and eat dinner as a big family - no such thing as Timah eating in the kitchen. I would get up to get her a refill of rice in repayment of all the things she had done for me in the day. Timah was very surprised that at the end of her first month, which was time we sent her home for Hari Raya, that I had given her a set of new baju kurung, kuih raya, some provisions for her kids - all these in addition to her 1st month pay. When I divorced 2 years down the road, I could sleep easily cos my Timah was there to watch over my two darling daughters and I kept up with paying her the monthly salary even thou her 'boss' was also paying her a salary. Timah left when my two gurls was old enough to manage on their own but of course I had wished that she stayed on for longer but I really could not force her to endure the forture of her new 'Mam'. end of cerita.

I really can relate to this topic. Although I have no experience with local maids but I feel we are too dependent on foreign maids. I got my new Indon maid 3 weeks ago, and during this short time span she has fallen ill 3 times and my barely 8 months old baby doll got a bruised on her forehead in her care. The strangest thing is, I get goose bumps when I'm near her. I have taken her for another round of health check but her tests proved negative. Apparently she has some ghostly thing with her and my husband and I have forced her to read the Quran with us every night.

I think ideally corporations should set up child care centres which are run by professionals so that we do not have to risk our children with incompetent and unhealthy foreign maids. Since we pay quite a bomb to maid agencies, I'm sure most of us will not mind paying if we get professionals to care and educate our children. Perhaps our Government should give tax incentives to corporations who set up these child care centres. Meanwhile, I'm gonna get my agent to replace this maid :(

i've got a blog about maids. kindly visit the http://maid-in-malaysia.blogspot.com and I will need contributions of postings on your experience with your maid. good or bad, happy or sad, whatever. the whole idea is to learn for each other whether your being refered to as ibu/bapak/mam/sir/ etc.